Re: Why choose Debian?
On 12 Jan, Steve R. Hastings wrote:
> I am interested in why people prefer Debian to other Linux
> distributions. Please explain the top few reasons why you chose Debian
> rather than something else.
>
> Perhaps we can collect the responses together, edit them, and put the
> result up on the debian.org web page. I have looked and looked, both on
> the Web and in the book store, and I have found few explanations of why
> people prefer a particular distribution. (There is lots of "why you
> should use Linux" but not much of "why I use Debian rather than
> something else".)
Well, it all happened about 5 months ago....
I'd started programming when I was just 8 on a BBC micro (which I still
have!). I loved it, and really liked the very high subset of BASIC that
came with it. I then moved on to Acorn RISC OS computers which also use
a very similar BASIC, and developed a few applications on it.
I then got a PC with Windows and started getting pissed off. I became
very annoyed by the fact that all the configuration files are hidden
away, and that you are never allowed to edit anything by hand. I tried
BeOS for a while and was very impressed by it, but it did not support
enough of my hardware and there wasn't enough software for it. So I
tried Linux.
Flicking through the various different homepages of the distributions
of Linux, I decided that debian was the least pretentious, the most
honest, and I really liked the whole philosophy of it. I downloaded
most of the slink distro (on a 56K modem this takes a LONG time!) and
then toyed with that for a bit before buying a potato set of disks.
I havn't looked back since. I've no experience of other distros, but
whenever I have to install linux elsewhere, I'll always use debian.
It's not easy to learn, but all linuxi have a steep learning curve. I
just really love the ability to know exactely why something is
happening, and the power of being able to change so much and edit
everything by hand.
It's great.
Matthew
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